


Building the Michael Sword: Some Assembly Required

by Sequesters



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean and Cas haven't technically met yet but Cas is already fascinated by him, Dean being the IKEA furniture in this situation, Gen, IKEA Furniture, this is kind of crack-adjacent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 16:09:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29438781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sequesters/pseuds/Sequesters
Summary: Castiel gripped Dean tight and raised him from perdition, everybody and their mother knows that.  What is less well-known, however, is that he was also responsible for re-assembling the body.Which he did with all the grace and patience of a man putting together a particularly difficult IKEA bunk bed.Inspired bythis tumblr post.
Relationships: Castiel & Dean Winchester
Comments: 5
Kudos: 54





	Building the Michael Sword: Some Assembly Required

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to [Remy](https://westernwoodblogs.tumblr.com/) for beta-ing this one!

“ Is that it?”

Castiel regretted the words the instant they left one of his many mouths.

Zachariah just let the question hang in the air for a moment.

“ The body has been decomposing in its grave for a while,” he finally said, “You’re lucky that they didn’t burn it to  _ ashes _ .”

That didn’t make Castiel feel any better. The body of the Michael Sword, sitting on the floor of the Beautiful Room, was barely anything more than a skeleton.

“ Remember, Castiel,” Zachariah said, “The Michael Sword’s... _ vitality _ is of the utmost importance. It must be in PEAK physical condition when it is returned to earth. It was specifically designed to be capable of housing one of our most powerful archangels, so you must build it back as accurately as possible. I can give you all of the components that you need, but you must do the work to  _ put it back together. _ ”

Zachariah gestured, and the room was suddenly filled with containers—veins, muscles, fat, hair, a tank of blood...all the components of a human body.

“ Do you understand?” Zachariah asked.

Castiel looked down and let a sigh ripple through his celestial form. He was starting to understand why no other angels volunteered for the job. The once-robust Michael Sword, the most anticipated vessel of all time, was barely a fragment of its former self—in no shape to house even its own soul, let alone an archangel. It was going to be a lot of work, to put it back together.

“ Yes, I understand,” said Castiel.

“ Just,” Zachariah sighed, gesturing to the mess of bones and decaying flesh on the floor, “Do NOT restart the heart until you have the body complete, WITH the soul inside. Understand?”

“ Yes,” Castiel said gravely, and Zachariah took his leave.

He was nice enough to leave some supplemental information in his wake. Some diagrams of human anatomy, several pictures of what the Michael Sword looked like in life, as well as three or four...fresher, human corpses as three-dimensional models.

Castiel had a big project ahead of him.

But, he thought, humans were always creating other humans with barely any conscious thought of their own. How hard could it really be?

-

Hard. It was very hard.

Creating a body from its component materials was more of an art than a science, and Castiel wasn’t much of an artist.

So he tried to make up for it with meticulousness. He examined the diagrams. He studied the images. He explored the example cadavers, which all had different forms of internal and external genitalia, as well as cranial thickness, and even intestinal length.

Mercifully, the Michael Sword’s skeleton was mostly intact, and could be healed traditionally. After that, he had to work...delicately. The body of a human was much, much smaller than that of his true form, and he had to limit his perception all the way down to the smallest of his outer appendages to do the job.

The viscera was pretty easy, going off what the other corpses looked like. Human internal organs were formed the way they were formed for very practical reasons, and each of them had their own specific job to do, and their own specific place in the body. But even so, an anxiety weighed heavily in Castiel’s angelic synapses. This was the  _ Michael Sword. _ He had to get it exactly right—if it failed under the duress of housing an archangel, during the ultimate fight between realms...there’d be Hell to pay, from above  _ and _ below.

-

The blood vessels were frustrating work. Even with the lightest touch, they kept  _ spewing _ blood everywhere, all over the carpeting of the Beautiful Room. The capillaries of a human were so small! How was all the necessary blood supposed to  _ fit? _

He recalled something, from one of his long-ago encounters with a human, about blood pressure, but he had always thought that they were just speaking metaphorically. Until now.

Castiel sighed. Humans were just one big coiled spring of tension, waiting to snap at any slight provocation. So fragile, yet so adaptable, and yet so  _ difficult to rebuild from scratch. _

And, he was  _ missing a muscle fiber, _ where did it g-oh. It was underneath the head the whole time.

-

The time that passed did not matter to Castiel. He had all the time he needed inside the Beautiful Room.

Or at least that’s what he told himself, when he had to re-string the ankle tendons a  _ third time _ due to a mistake.

-

By the time he moved on to the skin, the body was starting to come together. But when Castiel looked at the photographs of the Michael Sword in life, and back at the reconstructed body on the ground, something was noticeably...off. He couldn’t exactly pinpoint what it was. But every angel in the garrison, every human on Earth, would be able to sense it. The Michael Sword was beautiful, as all of God’s creations were. But Castiel’s recreation...it was off model enough to be a bit unsettling, but not enough for him to know what needed fixing.

Castiel really wasn’t much of an artist.

Frustrated, he paused in his work on the body, and glanced at the soul, in its soul catcher. A human soul, intimately linked to its body as it was, would know  _ exactly  _ how its body was supposed to be constructed, down to the tiniest minutia. A human soul would contain the perfect blueprint, for what the body in front of him was supposed to be. But Castiel was not supposed to  _ touch  _ it. He was supposed to just...tip the soul into the body, to prevent any unnecessary...contamination.

But, he reasoned, he already _ had _ . They had laid SIEGE to Hell, and it had all gone sideways very, very fast. In the interest of time, instead of using the soul catcher, he had gripped the soul with his bare hands and stored it deep inside of himself as he fought his way back out of the pit.

He remembered the onslaught of information about the soul’s life on earth flooding his senses, but he hadn’t bothered to process any of it. He was  _ busy _ .

But now…

He looked around, to confirm that he was alone, before snaking one of his outer hands into the soul catcher.

He paused for just a moment.

Then carefully, gently, made contact.

He was  _ immediately  _ overwhelmed with information, a stream of human sensory input flooding his mind and completely overpowering his heavenly senses.

_ Focus, Castiel _ , he thought to himself, struggling to keep himself afloat in the sea of memories,  _ Perceive the Michael Swords true body through the conduit of its soul. _

He concentrated, and suddenly-

_ Blood pumping, heart racing- _

The capillaries, the  _ capillaries,  _ that’s how they work-

_ Its ears ringing- _

The eardrums are meant to go just so _ - _

_ Its joints jarring with impact- _

Three more grams of cartilage to each of its knees-

_ Staring at himself in the mirror- _

He has freckles, just a dusting across each cheek-

_ Cutting his own hair- _

Adjust the color of the follicles-

_ His vision focusing on the funeral pyre- _

Adjust his interpupillary distance-

_ His eyes blurring with tears- _

The tear ducts, they were angled wrong by one-sixteenth of a degree-

_ The view of the hellhound, ripping his body to shreds, rending him apart with unimaginable pain, blood pouring our of his body- _

Castiel broke away from the soul, heaving deep, phantom breaths as if he himself possessed a pair of lungs. He hadn’t expected the experiences of humanity to be quite so...intense.

He collected himself. It was all worth it, in the end. That brief connection had given him all the information that he needed. Now he could fix up the body, and finally make it look not just human, but  _ right _ .

Castiel wasn’t much of an artist. But manipulating muscles, stretching out ligaments, adjusting skin, and bone, and fingernail...he rather thought that he was learning how to be.

-

And finally, after a wholly indeterminable amount of time, the Michael Sword was complete. Better than complete, it was as if he were never damaged in the first place.

So Castiel picked up the soul catcher, and gently tipped the soul into the body.

The body seized, and Castiel worried that he had done something wrong, but the light from the soul slowly stretched until it settled back into the body, metaphysically lighting him up from his head to his toes, and-

Forming a blistering handprint-shaped scar, on the left shoulder.

Well, that was embarrassing. He had left a soul-mark on the Michael Sword. Was it his carelessness in Hell, or his peek into the soul-memories that caused it?

Oh well. Either way, it couldn’t be helped. If asked, he would just blame it on the battle in Hell.

Castiel hoisted the body, a wholly different experience than holding a soul, and prepared to travel back to Earth.

-

He laid the body back into the grave they had taken it from. Zachariah had said that doing so would “disrupt the natural order less”, as if bringing a human soul back to life was anything other than a disruption of the natural order.

Castiel stood back, and observed the body laying in the casket. It was a little bittersweet, to part with his creative project. But he could rest well, knowing that he had done the Michael Sword justice.

Time for the final step.

Castiel reached out, phasing through the skin and muscle and bone that he now knew so well, and started his heart with a touch.

Dean Winchester awoke with a gasp, and clawed his way out of the earth.

And oh, the glorious moving parts came together in a way that  _ fascinated  _ Castiel right to his core. Dean using his fingernails, his lungs, his arm and leg muscles swinging and kicking, fighting to survive...and succeeding. His soul and his body, intertwined as one functioning unit once more, he burst out of the ground and stood victorious atop the dirt--visibly confused, yet alive.

Invisible to human wavelengths, Castiel watched as Dean took stock of his situation, chest heaving, blood pumping, soul  _ shining. _

If Castiel had a mouth, he’d be smiling. He couldn’t wait to see what Dean would do next.

**Author's Note:**

> I laughed so much at that post that I couldn't help but expand on it a little. This is the first time I've written anything publish-worthy since December! I have So many WIPs, but a bad bout of writers block :(
> 
> Anyway. Thanks for reading, and Happy Valentines Day!


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